Wacom Pressure Curves Suck

Snowfly · Sep 2010

I came across this thread on the Wacom forums, tried to wrap my head around what they were discussing, and tried it out for myself. In a nutshell, my Photoshop now feels like the sketching brushes in SAI and Sketchbook Pro.

Apparently, getting under the hood to manually fine tuning your Wacom tip feel isn't a new trick, but still not a lot of people know about it. Anyhow I sketched out my notes, and thought I'd post them here for feedback and also to spread the word about this trick.

*In Windows, you can do everything discussed here through a little frontend app, downloadable here.

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Related links:
Junkyard Sam - Manually Adjust of Pen Sensitivity
Conceptart.org discussion thread

Zpanzer · Sep 2010

Looks interresting. I have to try this out!

rollin · Sep 2010

thx. this was now so easy that I eventually did the changes

cheers!!

Snowfly · Sep 2010

Let me know if anything's unclear or needs more explaining!

Slides 5 and 6 have been updated, previously I got the numbers reversed. So if you followed any of the recipes...might wanna go back in there and tweak them again.

The control point values are basically organized into 3 pairs, which say "Press this hard to get this pressure."

Also I confused RSI for RSS, doh!

Steve Schulze · Sep 2010

Isn't this the same effect as turning down the click threshold in the Wacom control panel?

Snowfly · Sep 2010

It probably is, though I sure don't have that option in my tablet settings (Intuos3/Bamboo)

Which Wacom are you using? (nevermind, I see click threshold on the Intuos3. In which case, fail)

rooster · Sep 2010

no, I think the click threshold affects the left side of the graph, not the right side as per the drawings

Emil Mujanovic · Sep 2010

Awesome!
I'll definitely pimp this shit on my Intuos 4, cos my low pressure threshold is whack at the moment. If i press really softly and release. It still thinks I have the pen down until I move the pen far enough away from the tablet surface. Annoys the shit out of me when sculpting.

Rwolf · Sep 2010

Tried this, but didn't like it. Probably because I use the spring nib, it made everything too sensitive.

Justin Meisse · Sep 2010

This is great, I messed with that curve editor in the past but I didn't really understand what I was doing, thanks for explaining things.

Calabi · Sep 2010

Works perfect for me, thanks snowfly.

Zipfinator · Sep 2010

Looks interesting but I haven't had any problems with pressure on my Intuos 4. I don't use it that much though so maybe I just haven't noticed it yet. If I do start seeing issues I'll definitely use this fix. Thanks!

Snowfly · Sep 2010

Cool, glad folks are finding it useful though the presentation's all over the place. Junkyard Sam's writeup is still the best guide to this.

Wacom actually addressed the issue of too large a dead zone with the Intuos4, but still they won't bring back a full blown pressure curve editor, so you still have to press very hard to get maximum pressure. You'll probably get the most of this tweak if you draw with a light touch like I do.

ErichWK · Sep 2010

Too bad my tablet doesn't work every time I restart my computer... I have to remove preferences every time I plug it in.. Otherwise I'd try this. =(

dejawolf · Sep 2010

looks nice. is there any way to fix the pen tilt as well? its been broken for ages, in that it works the opposite way it should (tilting causes strokes to become thinner instead of thicker)

conte · Sep 2010

do you use standart windows notepad for editing that dat file? when i change anything in it, i have error- can't find driver

conte · Sep 2010

oh hey Dado, you're right, saving in ANSI helped, thanks a bunch!
and Chris, thanks for sharing all this info and images!

Snowfly · Sep 2010

Dado - thanks for the addons! It's a running joke that Wacom intentionally sets the pressure curve so high to make a little extra lunch money from selling spare nibs. and that's a good point...i've got to get a screen protector for my tablet. those things come in a matte finish also so that might be a good alternative.

Dejawolf - in which software have you come across this problem though? is it a photoshop thing? i personally don't use tilt much, but with Painter, the brushes that do support tilt work as expected. i'll poke around and see if i can find any tilt settings in there though.

Conte - glad you got that sorted out

and yeah the frontend is less of a headache than the method i wrote about. reason i do it manually is because i'm on a mac so no such app exists.

Mypeople · Sep 2010

wow, i cant WAIT to try this out in the morning. bookmarked! thanks so much for that.

Wells · Sep 2010

ooh, will definitely try this out.

thanks for doing all the work

Mypeople · Sep 2010

i adjusted my wacomtablet.dat file, restarted my pc now my tablet wont turn on? the services say its running, if i try and go to tablet properties it says "talbet driver not found" i dont know WHAT just happened. man i hate wacom drivers so gd much.

Two Listen · Sep 2010

This is great, I saw this listed elsewhere but it wasn't explained very clearly. I've never had a lot of trouble with the Wacom default settings, but I did notice and sometimes get frustrated having to push so hard for those heavier marks.

I'm trying this out, thanks for posting.

Mypeople · Sep 2010

I called wacom, got my tablet working again. my problem with doing this curve stuff Snowfly, if i check my .dat file after i've saved it always says this

UpperPressureThreshold 5
LowerPressureThreshold 65525
PressureCurveControlPoint 20 0 819 1024 1638 2047

Low pressure should be 1 right? i dont get why it keeps changing
using intuos 4 btw

Justin Meisse · Sep 2010

It seems to be a difference that appeared recently, I had a small tablet in
'98 and I was able to do very light strokes on it and I've never gotten the same results on newer models.

Snowfly · Sep 2010

Mypeople- Yeah lower threshold should always be lower than upper. that is strange, not sure why it keeps reseting itself to that value. The only reason I can think of is there may be a Wacom process running while you edit the .dat, that usually borks the changes...are you editing manually? Try using the Pressure Curve Tool and see if you still get that error.

D4V1DC · Mar 2011

Dado Thanks for that link I needed it, I am having an issue with some random drag thing after I finish a brush stroke it keeps drawing for like 1-2 seconds after I lift the pen and before I put it down it creates some random stroke before the pen touches the surface of the tablet...

Anyone got any ideas?
It was doing that before I installed/edited the pressure settings with the tablet pressure curve tool.

Edit:
For now the remove preferences from the utility app did the trick but I still worry this will not work indefinitely.

Fingus · Apr 2011

I'd just like to add to this that if you're on a Mac and want to restart your tablet driver without rebooting you can find the PenTabletDriver.app or WacomTabletDriver.app under ~/Library/Application Support/Tablet/

loop · Aug 2015

ur a fucking retard

stickadtroja · Aug 2015

angry necros are the worst

EDIT: nice thats threads like this inst needed anymore since these things are doable in the wacom properties now. yey!

Yogibear · Aug 2015

Hey kind of unrelated but what did you use to sketch your notes?

Add3r · Aug 2015

That angry necro though, just don't even know what and/or why. People.

AtticusMars · Aug 2015

stickadtroja wrote: »

angry necros are the worst

EDIT: nice thats threads like this inst needed anymore since these things are doable in the wacom properties now. yey!

That's only true if you have an Intuos pro or better.

iadagraca · Aug 2015

AtticusMars wrote: »

That's only true if you have an Intuos pro or better.

I have it on my intuos 4.

And thanks to this forum post! I didn't know I had it before :O

Strokes seem so much better now.

AtticusMars · Aug 2015

iadagraca wrote: »

I have it on my intuos 4.

And thanks to this forum post! I didn't know I had it before :O

Strokes seem so much better now.

Thats because the intuos 4 is an intuos pro tablet. Its just not called that because it predates the naming convention change.

iadagraca · Aug 2015

I see, interesting to know.

akej74 · May 2019

Hi, I'm a new user on Polycount, I hope it's OK with a reply to this thread even that it's a bit old.

I have just bought a Wacom Intuos medium (not the pro version) and noticed the problem with the pressure curve as described in the initial post. Editing the xml file manually worked fine (I have 4096 levels on my Intuos), but I'm not clear on the meaning of "LowerPressureThreshold" and "UpperPressureThreshold" and how these related to "PressureCurveControlPoint".

The reason I'm asking is that I'm planning to to create a Python app for editing the xml file and I would like to fully understand all parameters controlling the curve. Maybe someone can help me with some more details on this...?

My plan is to create the app with Python and PyQT with support for both Windows, OSX and Linux. I will initially focus on Windows as that is my main OS and I will put the project on GitHub as open source.

CreativeSheep · May 2019

@akej74
I don't know if this information is still relevant in this thread.

akej74 · May 2019

@CreativeSheep
Thanks for your reply, it looks like the XML format is still the same; the problem is that the curve editing tool is not exposed in the Wacom driver for the normal Intuos 2018, only for the Intuos pro. Anyway, I found the information I was looking for as follows:

LowerPressureThreshold = Minimum pen input sensitivity (all values reported by pen below this value are cut and represented as zero)
UpperPressureThreshold = Minimum pressure for “click” recognition

Wacom Pressure Curves Suck

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